MPQ Developer Q&A #1 October - Answer Time!

Unknown

Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?
At least they didn't say we are never gonna give them third abilities, so I am hopeful still. But I agree with Budget Player Cadet. Not sure about Doom and Ragnarok but Loki and Bullseye don't need nerfs on their existing abilities when adding a third one for sure. Bullseye could even use a further buff by getting his black ability cost reduced to 12. Not to mention his health points are already at the bottom and his protect tiles are weak. It's as if devs were going to add a killer third ability to him and nerfed pretty much all of what he has and then gave up on adding the ability and left him like that.

Q: Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? Some powers in the game are almost impossible to use.
I don't like the answer to this question at all. That's all I'm gonna say. People already said plenty.

Spoit

And honestly they kind of dodged the question about powers being overcosted by trying to distract us with the hilariously overcosted IM40, when plenty of their BRAND NEW releases are also drastically overcosted. Both in general and for their actual effects. Like, does anyone think that will actually ever cast his nonpassive powers? Or that it's worth the AP for 's non-red? And those are the 2 newest chars!

yogi_

For those who missed out on this from True Healing and the source of the sometimes heard "This too shall pass".

20th May 2014
Handling Balance Changes

It is a never-ending challenge to keep our live games balanced. In Marvel Puzzle Quest, there are no mechanisms to self-balance overpowered characters and so if a single character is overly powerful, our spenders will tend to gather around them. All players have access to these characters so it’s not unfair, but it results in gameplay that lacks variety, which is ultimately bad for everyone’s enjoyment and ultimately our long-term retention.

In free-to-play, the balancing of durable goods presents a particular challenge. Players may have spend real-world dollars to upgrade the character and those who haven’t may have invested many hours grinding away. We’ve been through a few of these re-balancing passes and have learned some valuable lessons:

* This too shall pass – While you need to expect and accept that there will be a backlash and the first couple of days will be painful, give it a few days before you judge the results. In the early days of MPQ, Ragnarok was massively overpowered and the day we changed it players were furious. A week later, it was no longer a topic of widespread conversation.
* Telegraph the change – As soon as you know a character is overpowered, make sure you let your players know that you know. Months ago, we published a list of the top-5 incorrectly balanced characters. A week ago, we published the specific changes that were coming to Spiderman. This week we expect to roll out the change
* Listen to Blizzard – “Make Everything Overpowered” is a design motto at Blizzard and we try to adhere to that here at Demiurge. At the end of the day, you need to think not just about the numbers but the emotional impact of a character. When you’re done, aim to have players think you didn’t go far enough!
* Give players an out – If players truly feel that your balance changes have made the durable no longer useful, then selling it for hard and soft currency should be a no-brainer. During the period after a balance change, we massively increase the sale price of characters.

When we made that sale-price change, there was only a small bump in the rate at which players sold those characters. Here’s a chart showing the number of people who sold those cards in the window surrounding the nerf: IMAGE.

We playtest the changes a ton and run them through some mathematical analysis that we’ve developed since launch. The end result is that if you’ve taken the time to max out your Spiderman ahead of your other rare cards, he’ll remain your best character.

GothicKratos

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]
Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?

A: “When” questions are super tough question to answer because they’re often out of our hands. We have first parties that need to approve our game, we have external events that pop up, and many other things that will constantly force us to shift priorities around. We love being able to directly answer questions, but “When” is a hard thing to stick a pin on, and we hate to disappoint.

To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.

This answer worries me somewhat, as it seems to imply that you guys don't know that a large part of why we want third covers is because these characters all suck. The only one of that list who is even remotely playable is Doom, and even he is low tier. Loki, Ragnarok, and Bullseye are all complete garbage. If your third ability would lead you to require toning them down, then that third ability would have to be pretty amazing.

Realistically, Ragnarok with a third decent power in the right color (purple, black, blue) would make him pretty good, since he already has pretty good HP, his green is relatively good for a 2* (damage, cascade potential v AP cost), and his red is also equally decent and has the bonus of feeding into the other ability. Ragnarok is not bad by any means, he is simply immeasurably outclassed but the other characters that have Red/Green abilities. Let's just hypothesize for a second, and we'll say for thematic reasons, they want to make Ragnarok similar to Thor, by giving him two AP generating abilities, and they slap on a Black ability that generated Red AP. As long as that ability does somewhat decent damage, he is now suddenly a pretty good character. He would have board clear, AP generation, and he'd be self-sustaining.

The same could be same for Doom, as you pointed out, he's not terrible, he is just lacking, mostly due to level cap and lack of a third ability. Summon Demons is a lot of persistent damage at high levels and will be even more devastating at 166, and with Technopathic Strike feeding it, it's a pretty consistent 1k damage per turn. If they gave him a passive something like "Whenever you make a Purple match Doctor Doom's nanobots True Heal Victor for /x/ Health, destroying 3 Purple AP in the process", he could be a fantastic tank with indirect damage potential.

Bullseye is a little more tricky. His passive has utter **** scaling. So yeah, he's **** out of the gate, but if they jimmied that some and gave him an ability like Take Aim, he could be self-sustaining (as far as his skills are considered), but it would still be rather difficult to trigger his Black. That being said, I never really got why Bullseye make Protect Tiles. If it were me, I would trash that ability and replace it with something else. If we wanted to take the liberty, we could literally give him Take Aim (since he's the DA Hawkeye equivalent anyways) for his Purple ability. If I recall correctly, his third match damage progression is in Green, so they could give him some sort of direct damage ability like, "Bullseye effortlessly threads the needle and delivers a devastating blow dealing /x/ damage and turns one Black Tile into a Precision Tile. This attacks deals an additional /x/ damage for each Precision Tile on the board." This would make him a burst assassin-type character with huge damage potential as well as sustained damage.

Loki, if we keep him as he currently is, is a strict support character, and if I remember, his third match damage progression is also green, we could slide him a Green Passive, "Loki transmogrifies himself to avoid detection and retreats to safety, If there are more than /x/ Green Tiles on the board, and Loki receives damage, he retreats to the backline and turns one Green Tile into a Deceit Tile. For each Deceit Tile Loki drains the enemy of /y/ AP from a random color." Now he's kind of like a reverse Hood that also counters Strike Tile creates and has board shakeup. Though, I do feel like his costs are too high for both his abilities.

The point of this wall of text is, by adding simple abilities to these characters their power distribution drastically changes. These are not simple buffs and nerfs to costs, like Yelena, Spider-Man, or IM40, and they shouldn't be taken lightly.

Oldboy

yogi_ wrote:

For those who missed out on this from True Healing and the source of the sometimes heard "This too shall pass".

20th May 2014
Handling Balance Changes

(Cut out)

We playtest the changes a ton and run them through some mathematical analysis that we’ve developed since launch. The end result is that if you’ve taken the time to max out your Spiderman ahead of your other rare cards, he’ll remain your best character.

I love spiderman but i fail to see how a fully covered spidey remains my best character when i have a sea of under-covered 3* and fully covered 2* that perform a lot better than him in pve AND pvp

Oldboy

We're not saying it's easy. But we'd rather have playable characters than new ones that last the duration of the next pve before going back into the box and not seeing the light of day until the next time they're needed for essential nodes. Hence the call to first rebalance the current crop of new and old characters that people seldom use but have tried so hard to cover before giving us more new (and potentially unplayable) characters that most of us can't/won't fully cover until months later

Edit : text below is quote from above. I dont know how to format it properly

GothicKratos wrote:

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]
Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?

A: “When” questions are super tough question to answer because they’re often out of our hands. We have first parties that need to approve our game, we have external events that pop up, and many other things that will constantly force us to shift priorities around. We love being able to directly answer questions, but “When” is a hard thing to stick a pin on, and we hate to disappoint.

To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.

This answer worries me somewhat, as it seems to imply that you guys don't know that a large part of why we want third covers is because these characters all suck. The only one of that list who is even remotely playable is Doom, and even he is low tier. Loki, Ragnarok, and Bullseye are all complete garbage. If your third ability would lead you to require toning them down, then that third ability would have to be pretty amazing.

Realistically, Ragnarok with a third decent power in the right color (purple, black, blue) would make him pretty good, since he already has pretty good HP, his green is relatively good for a 2* (damage, cascade potential v AP cost), and his red is also equally decent and has the bonus of feeding into the other ability. Ragnarok is not bad by any means, he is simply immeasurably outclassed but the other characters that have Red/Green abilities. Let's just hypothesize for a second, and we'll say for thematic reasons, they want to make Ragnarok similar to Thor, by giving him two AP generating abilities, and they slap on a Black ability that generated Red AP. As long as that ability does somewhat decent damage, he is now suddenly a pretty good character. He would have board clear, AP generation, and he'd be self-sustaining.

The same could be same for Doom, as you pointed out, he's not terrible, he is just lacking, mostly due to level cap and lack of a third ability. Summon Demons is a lot of persistent damage at high levels and will be even more devastating at 166, and with Technopathic Strike feeding it, it's a pretty consistent 1k damage per turn. If they gave him a passive something like "Whenever you make a Purple match Doctor Doom's nanobots True Heal Victor for /x/ Health, destroying 3 Purple AP in the process", he could be a fantastic tank with indirect damage potential.

Bullseye is a little more tricky. His passive has utter **** scaling. So yeah, he's **** out of the gate, but if they jimmied that some and gave him an ability like Take Aim, he could be self-sustaining (as far as his skills are considered), but it would still be rather difficult to trigger his Black. That being said, I never really got why Bullseye make Protect Tiles. If it were me, I would trash that ability and replace it with something else. If we wanted to take the liberty, we could literally give him Take Aim (since he's the DA Hawkeye equivalent anyways) for his Purple ability. If I recall correctly, his third match damage progression is in Green, so they could give him some sort of direct damage ability like, "Bullseye effortlessly threads the needle and delivers a devastating blow dealing /x/ damage and turns one Black Tile into a Precision Tile. This attacks deals an additional /x/ damage for each Precision Tile on the board." This would make him a burst assassin-type character with huge damage potential as well as sustained damage.

Loki, if we keep him as he currently is, is a strict support character, and if I remember, his third match damage progression is also green, we could slide him a Green Passive, "Loki transmogrifies himself to avoid detection and retreats to safety, If there are more than /x/ Green Tiles on the board, and Loki receives damage, he retreats to the backline and turns one Green Tile into a Deceit Tile. For each Deceit Tile Loki drains the enemy of /y/ AP from a random color." Now he's kind of like a reverse Hood that also counters Strike Tile creates and has board shakeup. Though, I do feel like his costs are too high for both his abilities.

The point of this wall of text is, by adding simple abilities to these characters their power distribution drastically changes. These are not simple buffs and nerfs to costs, like Yelena, Spider-Man, or IM40, and they shouldn't be taken lightly.[/quote]

Pylgrim

yogi_ wrote:

* Listen to Blizzard – “Make Everything Overpowered” is a design motto at Blizzard and we try to adhere to that here at Demiurge. At the end of the day, you need to think not just about the numbers but the emotional impact of a character. When you’re done, aim to have players think you didn’t go far enough!

Man, did they forget this tenet when they designed Beast and Doc Ock?

GothicKratos

Oldboy wrote:

We're not saying it's easy. But we'd rather have playable characters than new ones that last the duration of the next pve before going back into the box and not seeing the light of day until the next time they're needed for essential nodes. Hence the call to first rebalance the current crop of new and old characters that people seldom use but have tried so hard to cover before giving us more new (and potentially unplayable) characters that most of us can't/won't fully cover until months later

And they said they have plans to do so, but it's 1) not a priority and 2) has a drawn out process. I feel like that's adequate.

The best thing I can compare it to is League of Legends, which puts out a new Champion about one a month, but also retools a legacy character about once a month. I feel like this is an acceptable pace. That being said, especially after reading this Q&A, they are currently also working on an entire storyline and a new game mode. Not to mention they are apparently working on characters all the way out until December - given the current trend of one character a month and assuming Ms. Marvel/Thorette/Devil Dino are this month's only characters - that's at least two new characters being design and tested right this second on top of a game mode and storyline.

Maybe we can cut them a little slack?

-==EDIT==-

Your quote broke because I accidentally added an extra closing tag when I was fixing it to only have that one quote.

Oldboy

I'm not complaining and i really do appreciate the effort the devs put into the game and this forum. I'm still having fun with the characters. But in terms of priorities, i'm just saying that retooling the current ones may/shld be a higher priority than coming out with new ones as that would mean a higher playability factor for current gamers than new characters. So even when we repeat pve or pvp at least we have fun using the new 'old' character

And i'm repeating myself again... i'll stop now

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

And they said they have plans to do so, but it's 1) not a priority and 2) has a drawn out process. I feel like that's adequate.

I think this misses the point. The main criticism against the devs' response to underpowered characters isn't so much that it's "inadequate" but rather, we disagree with it. It should be a priority, a top priority even and certainly one above the creation of new characters.

As for cutting the devs some slack, I actually didn't really have a problem with the current state of the game until this Q&A. Yes, of course there are huge imbalances and a whole stable of useless characters, but I'd always assumed it was something the developers were carefully working on and thinking long and hard about how to do it right, etc. So if it takes some time, ok, that's the nature of game design.

However, their response here makes me think I've cut them too much slack. Their tone is oddly dismissive. "Yes, you players have these valid concerns but we're too busy working on things we care about (which you don't care about) so we'll get to the things you care about when we have time. But don't worry, we're thinking about it!" I mean, this is an exaggeration but this is what it comes across as to me. But hopefully, this is just another case of internet miscommunication.

Spoit

They also seem really reluctant to do iterative changes. Kind of feels sometimes like they let perfect become the enemy of good.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

They also seem really reluctant to do iterative changes. Kind of feels sometimes like they let perfect become the enemy of good.

If they don't have a plan for a test server then iterative changes are still no different from randomly guessing. For example next patch could change Bewilderment to 8 AP. That'd certainly be iterative and a very safe bet, but it's at best busy work and it's not like people are going to rush out and level up Psylocke after this change so you likely won't have very much data so you're still just guessing. Given the significant costs to invest in characters in this game you simply can't expect people to try someone who had a marginal improvement and without that data anyone's balance change is still just guessing, and if you're going to guess you might as well go for the complete solution. Sure, you can guess wrong on the complete solution too, but a partial solution like "Bewilderment now costs 8 AP" solves nothing without a test server to collect data.

dr tinykittylove

The replies on end times and new game modes sound promising - new game modes by end of this year means soon!

But I just don't understand why you guys don't want to work on a third power for the villains. Look, if you added a good new power and put the character as reward in the usual pve/pvp, don't you think there would be the same, or even a bigger mad rush for it as for a new character?

Considering as we are likely to have enough covers that they would become playable immediately or much faster than the usual new character, I should think so.

IM40 was one of the first 3*s I had enough covers to use, and I still bring him out to exercise now and then for the challenge of it, but now that I have covered Black Panther, Patch, Hulk, Punisher, Steve, Psylocke and Thor, do you think he'll see as much use outside events where he is buffed or in easy pve nodes? I don't want him to be op, I just want him to be a non-joke option I can use when I'm not horrifying my alliance-mates.

Unknown

Soooo....no Sentry nerf?

ShomiTheMonkey

I am asking you, the MPQ community to vote in on what I'm saying here now: After seeing the recent outflux of characters that D3 has recently released and continues to release, the better Alliance rewards (3* and 4* covers) have and will become unreachable by about 2500 of the current Alliances out of the 2600+ that now exist. As if always fighting against 4* Xforce, Sentry, Daken and Hulk to even have a chance to get 1 top 100 cover wasn't repetitively brutal enough, soon in PVP you will be fighting maxed out characters 4* Devil Dinosaur and 4* Lady Thor alongside them. D3 has now given us this ultimatum to these 2500 Alliances is: BUY OUR INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED COVER PACKS WITH A VERY LOW CHANCE OF GETTING CHARACTERS THAT WILL BE NECESSARY USE IN TO EVEN COMPETE FOR THE TOP REWARDS IN PVE or for COVERS YOU DONT ALREADY OWN or SPEND 2500 to increase the 4* characters that will soon RULE the playing field if you are LUCKY enough to get more that one color towards its completedness. Please help me make D3 understand that it is close to completely destroying the HOPE of most of the people out there that WANT to play this game but WON'T be able to have fun playing this game in a COMPLETELY UNLEVEL playing field. Please help them to understand how to save this game by upvoting this post. Your vote is important here and I thank you for taking time to read this and help D3 to save this game.

Pylgrim

ShomiTheMonkey wrote:

I am asking you, the MPQ community to vote in on what I'm saying here now: After seeing the recent outflux of characters that D3 has recently released and continues to release, the better Alliance rewards (3* and 4* covers) have and will become unreachable by about 2500 of the current Alliances out of the 2600+ that now exist. As if always fighting against 4* Xforce, Sentry, Daken and Hulk to even have a chance to get 1 top 100 cover wasn't repetitively brutal enough, soon in PVP you will be fighting maxed out characters 4* Devil Dinosaur and 4* Lady Thor alongside them. D3 has now given us this ultimatum to these 2500 Alliances is: BUY OUR INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED COVER PACKS WITH A VERY LOW CHANCE OF GETTING CHARACTERS THAT WILL BE NECESSARY USE IN TO EVEN COMPETE FOR THE TOP REWARDS IN PVE or for COVERS YOU DONT ALREADY OWN or SPEND 2500 to increase the 4* characters that will soon RULE the playing field if you are LUCKY enough to get more that one color towards its completedness. Please help me make D3 understand that it is close to completely destroying the HOPE of most of the people out there that WANT to play this game but WON'T be able to have fun playing this game in a COMPLETELY UNLEVEL playing field. Please help them to understand how to save this game by upvoting this post. Your vote is important here and I thank you for taking time to read this and help D3 to save this game.

Unfortunately your belief that Dino will be not only a viable, but in fact, a required character to be competitive automatically makes harder to take seriously whatever else you are saying.

ShomiTheMonkey

4* Devil Dinosaur will likely now be REQUIRED for an upcoming PVE event to place with any high competitive score as was DEFINITELY the case when 4* Nick Fury became required for PVE nodes so think about that if you are being FORCED to BUY the character if you cannot compete for him currently and the same will hold true for 4 * Lady Thor. Please understand that the majority of players that want these 4* characters will HAVE to BUY a very low % chance to win these characters. Do you find this maketing strategy fair for these 2500 Alliances who don't get the Alliance rewards for placing in the top 100 Alliances? There are other ways for D3 to make money and make this game more fair, less repetitive and more fun to play. So please understand what I am saying below and upvote this post. I thank you for taking the time to read and vote!

I am asking you, the MPQ community to vote in on what I'm saying here now: After seeing the recent outflux of characters that D3 has recently released and continues to release, the better Alliance rewards (3* and 4* covers) have and will become unreachable by about 2500 of the current Alliances out of the 2600+ that now exist. As if always fighting against 4* Xforce, Sentry, Daken and Hulk to even have a chance to get 1 top 100 cover wasn't repetitively brutal enough, soon in PVP you will be fighting maxed out characters 4* Devil Dinosaur and 4* Lady Thor alongside them. D3 has now given us this ultimatum to these 2500 Alliances is: BUY OUR INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED COVER PACKS WITH A VERY LOW CHANCE OF GETTING CHARACTERS THAT WILL BE NECESSARY USE IN TO EVEN COMPETE FOR THE TOP REWARDS IN PVE or for COVERS YOU DONT ALREADY OWN or SPEND 2500 to increase the 4* characters that will soon RULE the playing field if you are LUCKY enough to get more that one color towards its completedness. Please help me make D3 understand that it is close to completely destroying the HOPE of most of the people out there that WANT to play this game but WON'T be able to have fun playing this game in a COMPLETELY UNLEVEL playing field. Please help them to understand how to save this game by upvoting this post. Your vote is important here and I thank you for taking time to read this and help D3 to save this game.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

Unfortunately your belief that Dino will be not only a viable, but in fact, a required character to be competitive automatically makes harder to take seriously whatever else you are saying.

Wall of text aside, to be fair, it's reasonably likely we'll see either Devil Dinosaur essential nodes or a PVP featuring him at some point.

vudu3

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Let's consider: Invisible Woman, Beast, Colossus, Falcon, Iron Man (Model 40), She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Storm (Mohawk), Doctor Doom, Loki, Ragnarok, Bullseye, and Bagman. The Barely-used Overcosted Thirteen Characters of Neglectedness (BOTCON).

Wait ... why does Falcon need a buff? He's niche, but pretty awesome as-is.

Unknown

Seems like most of the first q and a was spent addressing the most pressing concerns players have had. It was a lot of words to say, we want to address everything players have mentioned, but we have finite time and resources and sometimes we don't get to choose what we give priority in addressing.

I agree with a large amount of what they said, I especially like that they're more interested in new content than fixing bagman's ap requirements. It's probably been long overdue to acknowledge our concerns as players, but also reinforce they can't fix or add new content overnight. As long as things continue to improve the way they have the past couple of months I'll be happy.